I have been working on a book on the self for more than year.  It started first as an attempt to write a paper on the self.  But the material grew larger and larger into a full size book.  It’s still somewhat disorganized, and may need some more work.  Or it may be in a finished form.  At any rate, before I publish it (myself, of course), I thought it’s a good idea to put it up in batches on my blog and see what people might think about it. Here I will start with the Preface and Introduction, and there will be 16 chapters altogether after that.  I will skip the last three chapters here because they are already included on my blog here.

 

 

 

 

Exploring the Self

 

 

Preface

 

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his book could be called an autobiography. It recounts some of the reflections on the topic I have had over a long period of time.   It is a complement to the essays on the topic I presented in my book, Being Yourself.[1]  The book is by no means a systematic philosophical or academic treatise. I don’t presume to exhaust the topic of the self in all its dimensions and depths, but my hope is that the forays I have made into the subject will be of some interest to the reader, be it a professional philosopher or a general reader.  The primary rationale for the approach I have presented here is to make discussions about the self more relevant to the lay reader.

There is no set order or scheme to the thoughts I have presented here, but I tried to provide topic headings and or asterisks to alert the reader to a transition. Due to the nature of my piecemeal writing, thoughts presented here are somewhat disjointed and at times repetitive.  Also topics overlap in different chapters.  

There is no special method I have adopted. I try to view things from both subjective and objective points of view.  It may be what I observe in human behavior or in my own experience; it may be introspective reports, or just an expression of my opinion. I elaborate the points of view in the second chapter.

My attempt here is not to present some sort of thesis about the self, but unpack the notion of the self as well as lay bare on the canvas the various aspects of the self as we already know them.  The book certainly does not pretend to expand the reader’s consciousness or show a path to ‘enlightenment’ (whatever that term may connote), but communicate my understanding of the self, with the hope that it might enable the reader to come to grips with some problems of living.

The reader may disagree with some of the observations I have presented here.  It may well be because it’s possible to look at the same phenomenon from different angles.  My hope at the least is that he or she might be prompted to conduct his or her own investigations into the issues on hand.

There are aspects of pre-human biological selfishness this book does not deal with, as the topic is not only beyond the scope of this book, but also because it is best dealt with by socio-biologists.

I wrote the chapter (“Some Final Thoughts” -- Chapter 16) in the way of relating my discussion in the rest of the book to what UG has said about some of the issues.  There are truly no final conclusions to be drawn from the discussion, but perhaps more questions than answers furnished.  The chapter specifically deals with some of the difficulties I have encountered in understanding what UG said about thought and experience. 

As the reader can well imagine, it is, of course, not possible to cover all the aspects of the self in a small book such as this.  Some topics about the self, not discussed here, have already been dealt with in my previous book, BeingYourself.

 

Part I

Introduction

“Know Thyself” – Socrates

 

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he self as a concept came somewhat later in the history of mankind.  In primitive communities, the idea of the double, the one who goes on trips in dreams, etc. is prior to any idea of the self.  More common is the idea of the self as a reflexive pronoun, referring to oneself in action.  This would not have been possible if it weren’t for humans’ ability to use and manipulate symbols to represent the world of things, people and themselves.  It’s not long before people started thinking about the mind and thoughts and what’s behind them.  Soon the idea of the soul emerged in the picture.  The soul or spirit was pictured as some sort of ethereal substance that inhabited the body to constitute the full human being and left it at the time of death.[2]  Also, animals and even plants were bestowed with a soul.  The idea of the ‘soul’ as the essence of the human being still persists in different cultures. The soul represents the true moral character and center of feelings for most people.

The concept of the soul naturally leads one to inquire into the question of what is my true self, i.e. whom am I really?  This is more so in Indian philosophy than in Western philosophy.  The great Upanishads launched such an inquiry and came up with various versions of the structures of the human being, as well as his psyche.  Several of these structures involve what is called the ego-sense or the ‘I’.  The motivation behind all such inquiries is to find a way out of the travails of human existence, especially conflict and suffering in the form of duality.  One of the common solutions found in Indian philosophy is that the ego or self is the source of duality and once we transcend the self, you also transcend duality and suffering which it involves. What was not clear in the traditional philosophical analyses is how precisely is the ego or self responsible for duality and suffering. 

It was somehow seen, both in India and the West (Spinoza comes to mind) that seeing oneself as separate from the whole of being, and arrogating to itself the status of a doer or agent, or being subject to the illusion that the world of duality or plurality is real, not realizing that oneself is but an aspect of the whole of being is the source of the problem.  And the solution lay in realizing the nature of the illusion, understanding the illusoriness of oneself as a separate self.

This book shares some of those concerns and inquires into not only the nature of the self, but also how it generates duality.  But the inquiry in this book is not so much concerned about the whole of being and the illusoriness of one’s relationship with it; it’s rather goes into the processes involved in the human psyche that create the duality and division, not only between oneself and the world, or oneself and other people, but also within oneself.

And within this analysis there is also a diagnosis of suffering as well as solution to it through an understanding of how it is generated.

The contention of this book is that the ‘I’ or self or ego is more than a mere component of the psyche.  In fact, it permeates practically all aspects of one’s existence.[3]  One of the conclusions I have reached in this book is that there is no unitary self behind all our mental life, but a conglomerate of selves more or less loosely connected with each other, and each more or less organized within itself.  However, I also conclude there are some grounds to think that the notion of the self or ‘I’ is not a pure illusion, because there are psychic phenomena which can only be explained by the assumption of an active agent, although there cannot be, in principle, any objective evidence to that effect, the ‘I’ being a pure subject.

2.  In order to embark on the analysis of the self, we need to go into how the self (or at least the notion of the self) is formed, i.e., the origins of the self.  Also important is the understanding that the self is a product of human thought or thinking.  Without that, our self is limited to the basic biological concerns of self-preservation, as well as generation, upbringing and possession of offspring, protecting food, family and what considers as one’s territory.  But the human being is not limited to these basic concerns.  His life is much more variegated than that, richer and more sophisticated.  This occurs primarily due to his ability to use symbols and faculty of thinking.

The human being as a person has many aspects: the biological, social and cultural, legal, psychological, emotional aspects to mention a few. Although each of these may seem to have an independent domain, the primacy of the biological is nothing that could be underestimated.    

So in this book, I first intend to discuss some basic differences between the subjective and objective approaches to the self and their intersections, as it seems to me that the basic controversies in the theories of mind-body relationship, which are intimately connected with the idea of the self, are primarily based on the differences between these approaches.

I would also propose in the following a thesis that the notion of the self is a product of human thought or thinking.  I will discuss at length a definition of thought, how it is related to our past experience, how it is related to the idea of meaning, and also how the mental world that is created by our thought is an ‘intentional’ world, the world which to us is what represents the world. 

I will try to discuss the ramifications of the idea of self, especially in its relationships with itself and with the world as it views it, as well as the many manifestations of the self.

I would also discuss in this book the origins of the self, the sustenance of the self, and the possibilities of dissolution of the self, whether it can be kept in abeyance even temporarily, or a person could be free from it totally, or if it is inevitable for human existence.

One caveat to my reflections about the self: Intentionality as a human phenomenon is indeed encompassed by what happens inside the brain.  In other words, the ‘mental’ pictures or sounds, often functioning as tokens for thought, are only meaningful within the realm of what happens in the brain. But what is strange and wonderful about the human being is that his behavior and dealings with himself and the world around are mostly governed by intentionality, although on various occasions he treats himself and is treated as well as nothing but a body, as for example, when someone is taken to an operating room for surgery, or carried to the burial ground.

 

 

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1.  Self-Published (2014) and available on Amazonl.com

[2] For instance, the etymology of ‘atman’, the word for the Self or Soul in the Indian tradition is ‘breath’.

[3] The ‘ego’ may sound synonymous with ‘self’.  But in actual usage it differs from it in that it refers more to an inflated sense of the self, thus generating various strategies of self-aggrandizement such as playing ego-games, compensation, inferiority, superiority, paranoia and such.